Thursday 5 June 2008 04.54 EDT
First published on Thursday 5 June 2008 04.54 EDT

Rose Tremain is one of Britain's most celebrated authors and yet her latest novel, the recipient of rave reviews, was not even longlisted for the Man Booker prize. So last night it was a case of patience rewarded when she won the £30,000 Orange Broadband prize for fiction with The Road Home.

"I was a bit upset not to have been longlisted for the Man Booker," Tremain told the Guardian. "In this country, prizes are like bumps in the road, sleeping policemen. You can't pretend they are not there, and anyone who says they don't care about them is being disingenuous. So to have won one of the major prizes feels great."

The author, while she has twice sat on the Man Booker jury, has never won that prize; and, though she has been shortlisted before for the Orange, she had never won either.

In her acceptance speech at the Royal Festival Hall, London, she said: "I would have spent more time perfecting my speech instead of my loser's smile."

Addressing those who disapprove of a women-only fiction prize, she added: "Come on, you guys, stop grumping. This is a women's fiction prize, and when AL Kennedy has won the Costa, Anne Enright has won the Booker and Doris Lessing has won the Nobel, I think there is a lot to celebrate."

She had not yet decided what to do with the money, "but the point about money for anyone creative is that it buys freedom.

Broadcaster Kirsty Lang, chair of the judges, said: "We were all very impressed by the novel's main character and the empathy with which she has written him. We liked the cast of characters, and, though it could have been a worthy book, it wasn't."

On the fact that Tremain has never won a really major prize before, she said: "We tried to exclude that consideration: we had to judge on the text alone. But now she's won I am thrilled."

The Road Home is the story of Lev, an immigrant from eastern Europe, as he tries to make his way in Britain. He sleeps rough in London; works in a Gordon Ramsay-style restaurant; and picks asparagus in East Anglia.

"I felt it was a very timely theme," said Lang. "Eastern European migration is one of the biggest things to have happened to our country in recent years and there hasn't been much seriously written about it in this way. That this book captures the zeitgeist and is about something that affects all of us is certainly a point in its favour."

The other shortlisted authors were Charlotte Mendelson for When We Were Bad; Sadie Jones for The Outcast; Nancy Huston for Fault Lines; Heather O'Neill for Lullabies for Little Criminals; and Patricia Wood for Lottery. Tremain's novel was the bookies' favourite.

Lang said the trends of the 120 submissions for the prize were, "immigration and identity and, alongside that, loss and bereavement. And these themes are connected. In an age of globalisation and migration these are the questions that we grapple with."

Previous winners include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006).